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Article

Although the sixtieth anniversary of the ASA’s founding offers an occasion to celebrate the association’s accomplishments, it also coincides with a historical moment of resurgent authoritarianism, growing intolerance, and renascent nativism. Democratic institutions in the United States and abroad are under attack; bigotry, injustice, and incivility have become re-energized. This article reflects on the discourses, spaces, and technologies employed by Africans to contest the multiple expressions of political exclusion on the continent over the last sixty years. It finds inspiration and lessons that might guide us as we develop our own forms of political advocacy in this illiberal age.

It is generally recognized that rural constituents are critical for winning elections. Development economists also recognize the importance of pro-agricultural policies to economic growth. Yet, little attention has been paid to the effect of rural politics on regime stability. Against conventional wisdom, this article argues that leaders who support rural areas and suppress urban demands are better able to stabilize the state and avoid coups. Because Ghana was able to politically stabilize after a period of state decay and five coups, the article presents an in-depth analysis of the tactical decisions made by the Ghanaian head of state who presided over these changes, John Jerry Rawlings. Using process-tracing, the study illustrates the importance of rural coalitions to stability and regime success.

In 1913, a Special Commission Court in Sierra Leone saw a series of trials concerning members of the Human Leopard Society, and conflated this society with the regional Poro Society. This article examines one of those trials and unearths motivations for murder and questions of bias. With the reinvention of identity in the shadow of slavery, a nuanced and complicated picture emerges of the situation. Though more questions than answers are offered by the details of the case, this article problematizes Sierra Leone under British authority, and shows a nuanced snapshot of power struggles playing out in a murder trial.

This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.

The problem of armed crime in late twentieth-century Nigeria was closely connected to the events of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra reveal how violent crime emerged as part of the military confrontation between Biafra and Nigeria. The wide availability of firearms, the Biafran state’s diminishing ability to enforce the law, and the gradual collapse of Biafra’s economy under the pressure of a Nigerian blockade made Biafran soldiers and civilians reliant on their weapons to obtain food and fuel, make claims to property, and settle disputes with one another. Criminal legal records illustrate how military technologies shape interactions and relationships in the places where they are deployed, and how those dynamics can endure after the war comes to an end. This speaks to larger theoretical questions about the symbolic and functional meanings of guns during and after wartime.

This article examines differing explanations for violence against foreign nationals in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the most compelling analyses in the scholarship draw from a family of arguments in the global literature that locates popular violence against outsiders within the context of declining sovereign power, explaining theatrical displays of force against enemies within as attempts at the retrieval of that power. To the extent that these arguments rely on the concept of a scapegoat, they are inadequate. More analytical attention needs to be paid to the scene of the encounters between the “us” and the “them” of collective violence.

From the outside, northern Chad has long been seen as an area of lawlessness, defined primarily by its inhabitants’ alleged propensity for raiding and thieving. From the inside, northern Chad indeed appears as an area that thrives on a rhetoric of predation. This, however, is perhaps best understood not in terms of “crime,” but rather as a striving for personal autonomy, as a public denial of reciprocity in a context where notions of bounded moral community and indeed of long-term social strategies of exchange are not much in evidence.

This article examines the historical as well as contemporary significance of South Africa’s 1913 ban on the recruitment of migrant workers from areas north of latitude 22 degrees south. This ill-conceived policy not only criminalized the employment of so-called “tropical natives” in South Africa but also triggered contestations, fueling illegal migration from the restricted areas. By 1933, when the ban was lifted, illegal migration from Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) had become a major site of contestations among policymakers, labor agents, business owners, and migrant workers in South Africa. While the dominant narrative in Southern Africa holds that illegal migration only became an issue of concern after the end of apartheid rule, this phenomenon has a much longer history in the subregion. Identifying factors that push people to move from one country to another and those that force or encourage travelers to cross international boundaries without following official channels facilitates the understanding of the complexities involved in cases of illegal migration wherever this practice exists. While low wages and other sources of insecurity in colonial Zimbabwe may indeed have compelled many people to consider moving to South Africa, such factors did not cause migrants to use unofficial channels in crossing the border. Rather, South Africa’s ban imposed numerous barriers, rendering it difficult for those seeking work to cross between the two countries through legal and/or formal channels.